Think back to when you were a child. Remember that curiosity that drove you to explore everything within reach, to want to go on voyages, take on quests and slay the dragon? Like the boy who eventually became King Arthur in the classic tale The Sword In the Stone, during our lifetime we will have incredible experiences. Perhaps we won't have Merlin at our side, but we have our own source of magic: a massively plastic brain with the capacity to learn new skills and form memory and thought processes.

By sustaining that sense of wonder and adventure from our childhood in our adult years, staying curious allows us to develop a stronger and more resilient brain, with the mental muscles needed to avoid rapid cognitive decline.

We reach our cognitive peak in our early twenties, but it is our conscious decision to remain engaged and interested in what the world has to offer as we age that, like actively brushing and flossing our teeth and gums, prevents brain decay.

Those who choose to stretch their minds will be the ones who adapt more readily, innovate more and engage in possibility thinking. They will be our Once and Future Brain Kings (and Queens).

What we focus on changes our brain, and this is what gives us our cognitive advantage.

Curiosity breeds success

As sociobiologist Desmond Morris noted, ‘We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by’, and during the course of our evolution, it has been our natural curiosity that has fostered learning by capturing our attention. What interests us determines our focus, and what we learn and will remember. Our pursuit of new information rewards our brain with the release of dopamine that drives us to continue in our quest. Also, we use our working memory in the prefrontal cortex to help us distinguish something that is new from something we have encountered already (although as we age our capacity to make this distinction can sometimes go a bit awry!).

One of the common traits of those who live the longest on the planet (while remaining cognitively intact) is their continuing curiosity about what is going on around them — their active engagement with the world.

When I was a child, I thought as a child

Our brain shrinks with age, around 2 per cent per decade. Increasing the brain's plasticity and neurogenesis can help to keep us mentally sharp and retain the cognitive edge we need in life — and especially in work, as the retirement age stretches closer to our eighth decade.

It used to be thought that the brain was hardwired, and we had only a short period of relative plasticity in our early childhood that allowed us to learn complex tasks — for example, a second language. Wrong! We never stop learning or adjusting to change in our environment. Although our brain's plasticity does decline with age, which means it takes more effort to learn new skills, we don't lose it completely, so there is always the potential to boost how well we think.

Glenn Capelli, the author of Thinking Caps, reminds us that maintaining a childlike curiosity helps us to absorb new ideas and ways of doing things. Neoteny means the retention of juvenile characteristics, implying a delay in our physiological development. Capelli believes we can apply neoteny to our thinking, thereby by preserving a child's spontaneity, creativity, love of exploration and living with a sense of wonder.

It's why:

• we are absorbed by the worlds we discover when watching Professor Brian Cox or David Attenborough on TV
• we choose to read fiction and lose ourselves in stories
• we are easily distracted by articles we find while surfing the net; the information may not be relevant to us right now, but it adds to our repertoire and may be useful to us later.

We may chide ourselves for ‘time wasting’, yet all these pursuits are actually hugely important for our mental muscles. They can lead us towards that state of flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which we find ourselves immersed in building knowledge and competence. And knowledge and competence are, of course, essential in our business lives, stimulating a healthy, fit business brain and future proofing our ability to succeed in our commercial realm.

Bright sparks

Cultivating curiosity begins with the need to know. A person who is curious and open to discovery doesn't accept that our ‘best’ will still be our best tomorrow.

Cultivating curiosity

As a kid, Jack Andraka seemed to be no different from his mates, except he came from a scientific family who had always spent time sitting around the dinner table together talking about world issues and reading books.

When a family friend died from pancreatic cancer, Jack became aware of, and curious about, the difficulty of early diagnosis. What could be done differently to help improve the woeful prognosis of this dreadful disease? The idea he came up with was a simple, inexpensive dipstick test for use on blood and urine to detect a biomarker in the early stage of the disease.

Jack's idea won him the Intel Gordon E. Moore Award in 2012, at the tender age of 15.

Impressive? Absolutely. It takes a burning desire for knowledge to seek answers to unsolved mysteries. While Jack's idea remains to be validated by scientific publication, clinical trials and further research, his story is about setting out to discover ‘why can't we improve this’. When we are curious, we stop focusing on what we already know and instead focus on finding out ‘what else?’

So how curious are you? Do you enjoy learning new things or would you rather just get on with what you feel comfortable with? Does the thought of being sent to work in an unknown land excite you, or put you in a tailspin of anxiety and horror that you might be expected to eat stuff you wouldn't recognise as food or have to converse with people whose language you don't understand? If you are presented with a new gadget, are you curious about how it works or do you simply want to know where the on/off switch is?

We actually know relatively little about what curiosity is and how it works. A study by Charan Ranganath and Matthias Gruger set out to discover why we remember certain things and not others and how we can make learning the really boring stuff a bit easier.

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have a knack for remembering those snippets of information that most of us would have absolutely no use for in our daily lives? While remembering who won the baseball World Series in 2012 or the cumulative age of the Rolling Stones might be useful for playing Trivial Pursuit or on quiz nights, it turns out our curiosity activates certain brain areas, as recorded on brain scans, and rewards us with some extra dopamine.

This helps us with remembering the minutiae and boring stuff too. When we are being curious about what happens in the finale of our favourite TV series, for example, we are more likely to remember things like where we were and who we were with when we watched it. This creates a higher level of other associations, which while not directly linked to the subject matter, makes it easier for the brain to remember that you were sitting next to Susan on the sofa and she was wearing a red shirt.

As Robert Bilder says, ‘curiosity enhances learning’. This is crucial in the workplace, because it means we can use our curiosity to deepen and extend our area of expertise, which sets us up to broaden our retention of knowledge in other areas as well.

Train your brain to change your mind

Sometimes when asked what I do, I'll explain how I teach people to become more brain fit to optimise their mental performance. The most common response to this is, ‘Oh, it's like those computer brain games is it?’

Online brain training programs are increasing in popularity, but on their own they are no panacea for growing a stronger, more resilient brain. Digital brain training programs put together under the guidance of neuroscientists and neuropsychologists do have their merits, but we can easily challenge our brain using other low-cost, low-tech methods.

This can be as easy as doing a cryptic crossword or learning how to juggle or dance a tango. These types of activities are useful for mental stretch because they provide us a smorgasbord of new tasks and functions to learn, and variance in the way in which we use our neural pathways.

The benefit of the online programs is their accessibility and how enticing they are, with their promise of improving your reaction speed, spatial awareness and memory. If spending 10 to 15 minutes a day on these programs appeals, then do it. However, if you have the choice between staying in and working on the computer or going out to watch a play, catch a movie or have dinner with friends, the latter options are far superior in driving your brain's plasticity.

Does brain training work? That depends on what you mean by brain training, and whom you ask!

Brain training is as it sounds. It is training designed to improve specific brain functions. Many brain games and apps on the market provide great entertainment, but they do not necessarily lead to a neurobiological change resulting in effective and enduring improvement in brain function.

By practising different skillsets, we become more efficient and faster when performing tasks within a game. But does this actually translate into an increase in functionality as we go about our lives, or improve our business capability?

In 2015 Megan Spencer-Smith and Torkel Klingberg undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of working memory training programs that showed a statistically significant benefit in reducing inattention in daily life. This is promising in view of the large number of children and adults who have difficulties with attention and focus. (It must be mentioned that Klingberg perhaps has a vested interest, in that he put together the Cogmed working memory program.)

Other researchers are not convinced. Monica Melby-Lervag and Charles Hume from Oslo failed to show any transfer of effect in their meta-analysis published in 2012.

So what does this mean? That a good dose of healthy scepticism remains in order until such time as more evidence is available to us. Meanwhile, if you enjoy these games, carry on — just don't expect a miracle. As our understanding of the brain continues to expand, there will probably come a time, sooner rather than later, when we can be confident that our training is producing the desired effect: positive and enduring changes in brain function and performance.

The authors of The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness: How to Optimize Brain Health and Performance at Any Age are careful to outline the conditions under which brain training can work.

The training must:

• ‘engage and exercise a core brain-based capacity or neural circuit identified to be relevant to real-life outcomes
• target a performance bottleneck
• be a minimum of 15 hours total per targeted brain function
• adapt to performance, require effortful attention and increase in difficulty.'

If I only had a brain: the Tin Man and other brainy myths

Before moving on to how to create more daily difference, there are a couple of myths to dispel.

Myth #1: We use only 10 per cent of our brain

This is, in a nutshell, inherently wrong and diminishes how amazing the human brain really is. We use all of our brain, most of the time. It would be very wasteful not to!

A child born congenitally blind still has the brain space allocated for the interpretation of visual stimuli, but it will be used instead for different purposes.

When an area of brain tissue is damaged by injury, the brain will recruit other areas to take over the lost function. This understanding on its own has revolutionised the medical approach to the management of stroke.

Previously a person who had sustained a brain injury through stroke would be offered six months of treatment to assist in the recovery of function. It was believed (wrongly) that that was the physiological limit of what could be expected. Today we understand better that the biological process of recovery takes a long time and can be painfully slow.

Jill Bolte Taylor, author and neuroanatomist from Harvard, had a massive stroke at the age of 37 that wiped out much of her left hemisphere. Her background meant she knew she could use her brain's plasticity to help her recover. When she realised what was happening to her, she remembered thinking, ‘I'm a very busy woman, I don't have time for a stroke! So I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine’.

It took a little bit longer than a week or two. Eight long years to relearn how to walk, talk, read and write. Her TED talk ‘My Stroke of Insight’ is a remarkable testament to the power of the human mind.

Myth #2: We are either right brained or left brained

Neither. We are both.

We are born with two hemispheres joined together by a thick band of corpus callosum, and they communicate with each other all the time. While each side may have some difference in function, we use whole-brain thinking. Labelling ourselves as left brained or right brained does us (and our brains) a disservice.

Remember, it's all about where we choose to place our focus. If you are fascinated by science you may spend your days looking at data, but you can still appreciate music and art. If you are more artistically inclined, you may also be interested in maths and how robots can help our lives.

Myth #3: Brain training makes your brain younger

Sorry to disappoint, but training it isn't going to change the age of your brain. It's not like plastic surgery where we try to make ourselves look younger than we are. What it can do is enhance certain aspects of how well we use parts of our brain. It's better to think of the training as polishing up those areas we pay more attention to.

Overall, your brain will continue to age along with the rest of you. Some processes, such as learning new skills, do slow down as we age; however, in turn we gain wisdom and studies suggest we are less stressed by extraneous circumstances. Stress does contribute to the aging process in terms of how well our brain works.

Myth #4: Brain training doesn't work

The first ‘brain games’ on the market offered little more than entertainment. The challenge has been to provide evidence that brain training produces not just improvement in the programs themselves through effort and practice, but real, enduring, positive change applicable to real life.

If you are considering trialling a brain training program, ask intelligent and forthright questions upfront. What does this program purport to do? How will it make a difference to me? Is it set up in such a way that I can ascertain how well I am currently performing in a specific task? Does it allow me to monitor my progress? How will this training translate into real benefits in the world I live in?

An athlete preparing to improve their physical fitness will often target certain areas of muscle in addition to general fitness work. A golfer may target their swing. A sprinter may focus on their start. In the same way, when choosing a brain training program it's important to know which of your mental muscles you want to focus on and the best technique to achieve that.

Participating in short bursts of brain training isn't enough. Ideally it's about committing to a minimum of 15 hours over eight weeks — and that is a minimum.

If you joined a gym but turned up only once or twice a month you wouldn't expect to see the same level of improvement in your level of physical fitness compared with committing to two or three sessions a week. To get the most benefit out of a brain training program you need to spend three or four 45-minute sessions each week. Some programs recommend continuing for three months, with occasional ‘top-ups’ thereafter.

Take the challenge: could you pull the sword from the stone?

The challenge of creating a daily habit of difference is to step out of our comfort zones, to try something new, something different, something we may not be very good at. It's about making our brain more muscular so we are at our best when we need to be — in the workplace.

I am not talking about being the best. I'm talking about being your best. To go back to our childhood stories, when ‘the Wart’ pulled the sword out of the stone to become ‘the true and rightful King of all England’, it wasn't because he thought he was the most fabulous thing since silver chainmail. It was because he was attempting to do his job as a squire properly.

So flexing your mental muscles is less about being ‘the best’ and more about stimulating your brain to be ‘your best’ to create new synaptic connections, putting in the necessary practice to strengthen them and continuing with the challenge. This is because once you have mastered a new skill, unless you continue to push the boundaries of your competence, the benefit of the challenge starts to diminish.

In starting any new challenge the three core components are:

• novelty. Take on something your brain doesn't recognise or hasn't done before.
• variety. Try a smorgasbord of different things.
• continuing challenge. The challenge doesn't stop with mastery of the first level; that's just to get you started!